The Template Process

Pick A Design

You choose which template best fits your business, in look and feel, but most importantly in function.

Build It

Following our easy step by step videos you build out the entire website. Or have us do it with a readymade one.

Tweak + Launch

You make any tweaks you need (like add your words and pictures) and get ready to launch.

weighing the options when it comes to your business

Custom Website vs Template Design

Custom Website

Template Design

Description

Fully custom from the ground up. Loads of prep work with your specific business goals as top priority. Solutions to fit your business now, and in the future.

Quickly get a site up and running that looks good and converts potential customers into your favorite clients

Level of Customization

Designed from scratch. Unique design for your business or brand. Strategy behind every design decision. Options for full copywriting and branding as well as design.

Easy to customize so no one should have the exact same site as you, but someone somewhere would have one similar to yours, since you'd be starting with a template.

One-On-One Guidance

Weeks of prep work, questionnaires, and chats between us. We'll sit down multiple times and really nail down your message, and how that translates to the design of your site. You'll leave your process with custom videos going into great depth on your site.

The videos are all yours. They've been created with care for you to follow along with. Unless you have us install it for you there's no 1-1 time for a template design.

Questions About Templates

Squarespace is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop web design platform, which is the home for your entire website, hosting, shop, blog, everything! Squarespace has amazing customer service and plenty of help videos and articles for about any scenario.

Squarespace is not only user-friendly, but it also offers amazing features like responsive design for mobile viewing, an easy to use drag-and-drop builder, amazing help support, and a library of written and video tutorials. They’ve been around for years and have tons of integrations with your favorite other apps and platforms. Ease of use for you and converting designs for your business, win win.

You can pay for Squarespace monthly or yearly, depending upon your budget. The plan we recommend is the business plan and it’s about $200/yr. Like a lot of online programs/software, the annual subscription is a better deal. If you’ve been paying separate hosting fees, Squarespace will become your new host, which means you’re not paying that every month to another company.

Following our setup guide and template customization videos are the quickest to get your content into your site. However, we do offer this service as an add-on. Please select this option at checkout if you’d like us to build the demo for you.

Yes and Yes! Each template has the ability to add a shop and blog rather the design itself has a demo for that page or not. Squarespace has amazing resources for getting your shop and blog set up and there’s not an additional fee to use either feature. You can add additional features by using tags, categories, and more to your blog posts and shop items. We love Squarespace because you can easily feature blog posts and products throughout your entire site, by category or other filters. Squarespace has amazing resources for getting your shop functionality set up as well.

After you purchase a template you’ll receive a getting started guide and resource page, unique to your specific template. This guide will help you plan your images and text for the site, as well as videos of how to make edits to the site. For help after the launch of your site, Squarespace has an amazing technical support team and a vault of videos, tutorials, and more.

Our favorite analogy for Squarespace is that it’s kinda like Apple vs Android debate. You’ll have an easy-to-maintain product with a dedicated support and development group. So far in our designing of websites, there has not been a challenge presented that we’ve not been able to solve on Squarespace, even if we used Wordpress for the job. Wordpress and “open source” platforms often compare to Android in that there are limitless options for customization, however, you’re dependent on lots of random Joe’s in their basements keeping their code in check, maintaining plugins, etc. We much prefer the “tight-knit” group behind Squarespace.

Websites that are strategic, beautiful, and built uniquely for your business.

Ready to break ground on your dream website?

About Site Maker Studio

We work closely with service based businesses and professionals in the home design industry to provide unique and well crafted messaging, branding, and custom website design solutions.let’s chat about your site>>